Beeline (fully owned by its parent company VimpelCom incorporated in Bermuda) with 55.7 mln subscribers in Russia (24% market share)

MegaFon, with 55.7 mln subscribers in Russia (27% market share). In April 2012, MegaFon was the first of Big-3 operators to launch 4G services. MegaFon partnered with Scartel to jointly develop their LTE network in Russia.

Clearwire owns nearly all the spectrum in the 2.5-2.6 GHz band and expects to use Time Division LTE on nearly all of it. Getting consumer devices in volume to support it is the trick. Clearwire hopes to get broad international approval and support for their approach, using TD-LTE though out the 190 MHz of the 2.6 GHz band, which they define as Band 41. Other countries, particularly in Europe, have divided the 2.6 GHz band into two chunks; one for Time Division (band 39) and one for Frequency Division (band 7).

According to reports last month, Virgin Mobile is looking to raise around US$100 million from investors to fund an expansion into as many as six new markets. It already has operations in nine countries, and has launched in two new markets already this year: Chile and Poland. Virgin Mobile USA is a wholly owned subsidiary of Sprint Nextel, and provides service to approximately 6 million customers.

Presumably, Virgin Mobile is simply looking for the best deal, and has no particular interest in one technology over another. Each Virgin Mobile branded entity acts independently from the others, thus the handsets, service plans and network radio interfaces vary from country to country.